His breath caught as her warm thigh glided along his, making a tremor of excitement run through him. Selena must have felt it, too, because she laughed softly.
“Didn’t get enough last night?” she teased.
He grinned down at her even as he told his cock to behave. They had other stuff to do this morning besides make love.
“Did you?” he asked.
“I guess not.” Her lips curved. “Though I have to admit some parts of last night are a little hazy, which I blame completely on you, by the way.”
“Yeah?” He lifted a brow. “How’s that?”
“It’s hard enough remembering details after a half dozen normal orgasms,” she said. “But after what you did to me last night, I’m lucky to remember any of it. I didn’t do anything to embarrass myself, did I?”
He shook his head. “Not a chance. You rocked my world a few times.”
That answer must have satisfied her, because she sat up a little straighter, her hand moving down his abs to his slowly stiffening cock. He might have told it to behave, but it wasn’t listening.
As Selena’s eyes traveled in that same direction, she caught sight of a set of four parallel scratches that ran left to right across his body from just under his pec to his hip flexor. She’d given him these particular gouges rather early on in the evening, so they were almost healed up completely already.
Selena shot upright on the bed, her eyes wide.
Brooks cursed silently as he heard her heart rate kick into high gear. “Relax,” he murmured, holding up his hands.
She might have done just that, if it wasn’t for the bite marks along his neck and shoulders. Unlike the scratches on his chest, some of the bite wounds were from later in the evening, so they were fresh and probably kind of scary looking.
She freaked, jerking away and scrambling all the way across the bed until she was close to falling off the side. He held up his hands again, trying to calm her with the gesture. It didn’t work. Her heart hammered even faster. Her eyes were starting to glow a little, too.
“Selena, I need you to calm down,” he said, keeping his voice low and as soothing as he could make it. “I know this is all crazy, but I can explain everything. If you just give me a chance.”
She shook her head. “There’s no explanation for this. I bit you. I hurt you.”
He shook his head in return. “Yeah, you bit me. But you didn’t hurt me. I can promise you that. Last night was the most amazing night of my life. There’s nothing you did that won’t be healed up by tomorrow.”
“Jayden!” she said in a loud voice, like she was trying to shock some sense into him. “Those wounds in your neck are deep. They’ll probably need stitches. Don’t tell me they don’t hurt.”
He took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh as he sat up higher against the headboard. “You don’t want me to tell you they don’t hurt? Then I suppose I should ask you the same question. Anything hurting on you at the moment?”
Selena looked confused for all of ten seconds before slowly looking down at her own body. She gasped, climbing completely off the bed this time. Her eyes widened to saucers as she caught sight of the light scratches tracing her shoulders, abs, hips, and thighs. They weren’t anywhere near as deep as the ones she’d put on him, but they were there, and Brooks could see her trying to understand how she hadn’t noticed them until now.
Then she lifted her hand to her neck and felt the bite marks. Her face went pale. “You bit me?” she asked, her voice filled with disbelief. “Bad enough to leave open wounds?”
He nodded. “We both got a little crazy last night. I get the feeling it’s always going to be like that for us. But like me, every mark on you will fade by tomorrow and be completely gone in a few days.”
She looked down at her body—her beautiful, sexy, smoking, passion-marked body—then looked at him in confusion. “What are you talking about? I look like I’ve been in a fight with a rabid mongoose. It will take weeks for all this to heal up. These marks on my neck will probably never go away.”
He sighed again and moved across the bed until he was sitting on the side of it. This was going about as badly as he could have imagined. But on the not-really-bright side, it wasn’t like he had to worry about dealing with a hard-on anymore. It was completely gone.
Selena took a few steps back but stopped when she realized he wasn’t going to come after her. He couldn’t miss the way her eyes darted around his place until she positively ID’d the location of her dress, bra, and shoes.
“I’d hoped I’d be able to find a better way to tell you this, but that option is off the table now,” Brooks said. “So I’m just going to dump it all on you and pray you’re able to deal with it. But you have to promise to stay calm and let me get it all out.”
She took a step closer to her dress, her eyes never leaving him. “You’re starting to scare me a little. I’ve never heard you babble like this.”
He was babbling? He’d hadn’t done that since he was five. Then again, he’d never had to deal with a situation like this before. Bad guys with guns were simple compared to this.
“When Pablo shot at you in your classroom, it started a genetic change in your body.” Damn, he wished Gage—or even Cooper—were here to tell him what to say. But in their absence, he went with his gut. And his gut told him that Selena wasn’t the kind of woman who liked to beat around the bush. “That’s why you’ve probably been experiencing some strange stuff that doesn’t make a lot of sense to you. Like being able to smell things you shouldn’t or hearing conversations when there’s no way in hell you possibly could. You’ve also probably found yourself getting upset, emotional, and even angry for no reason.”
She stared at him, the confusion in her eyes painful to see. “How can you possibly know all that?”
